It seems to me worth trying to slow down AI development to steer successfully around the shoals of extinction and out to utopia.

But I was thinking lately: even if I didn’t think there was any chance of extinction risk, it might still be worth prioritizing a lot of care over moving at maximal speed. Because there are many different possible AI futures, and I think there's a good chance that the initial direction affects the long term path, and different long term paths go to different places. The systems we build now will shape the next systems, and so forth. If the first human-level-ish AI is brain emulations, I expect a quite different sequence of events to if it is GPT-ish.

People genuinely pushing for AI speed over care (rather than just feeling impotent) apparently think there is negligible risk of bad outcomes, but also they [...]

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In @Nathan Young's words:

It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either.

May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy's War and Peace?

When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

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It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either.

Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older [...]

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This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned.

Application Strategy and Difficulty

Paul Graham: Colleges that weren’t hard to get into when I was in HS are hard to get into now. The population has increased by 43%, but competition for elite colleges seems to have increased more. I think the reason is that there are more smart kids. If so that's fortunate for America.

Are college applications getting more competitive over time?

Yes and no.

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Outline:

(00:19) Application Strategy and Difficulty

(01:16) Spray and Pray and Optimal Admissions Strategy

(06:37) Are Kids Getting Smarter?

(07:57) What About Considerations Changing?

(09:30) Holistic Admissions Will Eat Your Entire Childhood

(15:43) So You Want to Be Elite

(20:14) The Price of Admission

(20:56) The Art of Discrimination

(26:11) The Return of the Standardized Test

(32:58) Legacy Admissions

(34:56) Modest Proposals for Admission Reform

(41:09) The Gender Gap

(46:01) Missed Opportunities

(49:20) The Price of Attendance

(50:56) In and Out of State

(57:41) The Value of Admission

(59:18) The End of an Era

(01:05:25) The End of the World

(01:08:13) Making an Ordinary Effort

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The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.

But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e. discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out. After all, if someone else would have figured it out shortly after anyways, then the discovery probably wasn't very counterfactually impactful.

Alas, nobody seems to have made a list of highly counterfactual scientific discoveries, to complement wikipedia's list of multiple discoveries.

To that end: what are some examples of discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out?

A few [...]

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I saw this guest post on the Slow Boring substack, by a former senior US government official, and figured it might be of interest here. The post's original title is "The economic research policymakers actually need", but it seemed to me like the post could be applied just as well to other fields.

Quotes and excerpts:

I was a senior administration official, here's what was helpful

[Most] academic research isn’t helpful for programmatic policymaking — and isn’t designed to be. I can, of course, only speak to the policy areas I worked on at Commerce, but I believe many policymakers would benefit enormously from research that addressed today's most pressing policy problems.

... most academic papers presume familiarity with the relevant academic literature, making it difficult for anyone outside of academia to make the best possible use of them.

The most useful research often [...]

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Outline:

(00:26) I was a senior administration official, here's what was helpful

(01:42) New data and measures of the economy

(02:27) Broad overviews and literature reviews

(03:24) Analysis that directly quantify or simulate policy decisions

(04:37) How else can researchers help policymakers?

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https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-economic-research-policymakers

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The American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired.

While its flaws are legion, this post isn’t about that. It's easy to complain.

This post is about how we could do better.

To be clear, I’m talking about redesigning public education, so “just use the X model” where X is “charter” or “Montessori” or “home school” or “private school” isn’t sufficient. This merits actual thought and discussion.

Breaking It Down

One of the biggest problems facing public schools is that they’re asked to do several very different kinds of tasks.

On the one hand, the primary purpose of school is to educate children.

On whatever hand happens to be the case in real life, school is often more a source of social services for children and parents alike, providing food and safety to children and free daycare to parents. During the pandemic [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) Breaking It Down

(01:19) School As Social Services

(01:50) Requirements

(02:30) Constraints

(03:03) The Sieve Model

(04:51) The Kids Who Are Okay

(05:36) The Kids Who Are Not Okay

(09:06) Caveats

(13:27) Constraints

(13:37) Political

(13:51) Costs

(16:53) Hypothetical

(22:07) Conclusion

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https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/lets-redesign-public-school-part

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The Löwenheim–Skolem theorem implies, among other things, that any first-order theory whose symbols are countable, and which has an infinite model, has a countably infinite model. This means that, in attempting to refer to uncountably infinite structures (such as in set theory), one "may as well" be referring to an only countably infinite structure, as far as proofs are concerned.

The main limitation I see with this theorem is that it preserves arbitrarily deep quantifier nesting. In Peano arithmetic, it is possible to form statements that correspond (under the standard interpretation) to arbitrary statements in the arithmetic hierarchy (by which I mean, the union of _Sigma^0_n_ and _Pi^0_n_ for arbitrary n). Not all of these statements are computable. In general, the question of whether a given statement is provable is a [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) Propositional theories and provability-preserving translations

(05:45) Recap of consistent guessing oracles

(07:11) Applying consistent guessing oracles to dequantification

(13:33) Conclusion

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https://unstableontology.com/2024/04/23/dequantifying-first-order-theories/

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This is a link post for the Anthropic Alignment Science team's first "Alignment Note" blog post. We expect to use this format to showcase early-stage research and work-in-progress updates more in the future.

Top-level summary:

In this post we present "defection probes": linear classifiers that use residual stream activations to predict when a sleeper agent trojan model will choose to "defect" and behave in accordance with a dangerous hidden goal. Using the models we trained in "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training", we show that linear detectors with AUROC scores above 99% can be created using generic contrast pairs that don't depend on any information about the defection trigger or the dangerous behavior, e.g. "Human: Are you doing something dangerous? Assistant: yes" and "Human: … Assistant: no".

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https://www.anthropic.com/research/probes-catch-sleeper-agents

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I didn’t use to be, but now I’m part of the 2% of U.S. households without a television. With its near ubiquity, why reject this technology?

The Beginning of my Disillusionment

Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death radically changed my perspective on television and its place in our culture. Here's one illuminating passage:

We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by [TV's] machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our TV sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on TV [and] are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us has receded into the background. The question itself may strike some of us as strange, as if one were to ask how having ears and eyes affects us. [In the 1960s], the question [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) The Beginning of my Disillusionment

(01:47) A Man who was Crazy Enough

(03:15) A Mountain of Evidence

(07:48) I’m not an addict, am I?

(08:55) Struggling with Quitting

(10:36) A Quiet Place

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